Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday September 08, 2009 @01:24PM
from the brief-shining-moment dept.

Rob Hearn sends in a piece up at PocketGamer.co.uk on why Apple suddenly pulled Manomio's C64 emulator soon after finally approving it. (El Reg has coverage too.) "It was a glorious few moments for retro gamers when Manomio's C64 emulator was finally approved by Apple and released to the eager, nostalgic iPhone public. Then, calamity! It was gone again. Apparently some wily users figured out how to access the Commodore 64 BASIC system that was originally packaged with the emulator — something that Apple wasn't too happy with, given the nature of the interpreter's code. By setting the keyboard to 'always on,' launching a game and restarting BASIC, players got into the 'empty shell' of their C64 emulator."

You have no idea. Someone could have hand-written a BASIC program that could download a BASIC virus off the Internet that could spread to other phones running BASIC and it would have taken down the AT&T network!

Naughty naughty Apple children, you have been misbehaving and Mommy and Daddy are going to have to take your shiny new toy away until you learn to behave. We are very disappointed and this is why you can't have nice things.

Now run along, and don't think we don't know you have been reading those reviews of Android-based phones - we found the magazines under your bed. No you can't have an HTC Hero.

The first iteration of Artificial Insanity, a joke Turing test I wrote back in 1982 that answered any question you asked, in context, with a smartassed answer, was originally written in Sinclair BASIC. One friend running the DOS version years later (written in dBase and compiled with Clipper) got so frustrated with the smartassed thing he broke his keyboard, he typed so hard.